Clustering with Consolidated Physical Storage?

Davathar asks: "My friend and I have been toying with the idea of building a cluster server. And in my research I've come up with a few questions I haven't found answers to yet. Right now this is just an idea we haven't put any money into. But if it seems feasible and fun, we may organize a LUG and build it. With dozens of individual machines standing alone and drawing power, the bill can add up quickly. So I've been trying to find ways to reduce power consumption and parts cost."

"It's always seemed to be stupid to convert AC to DC for the UPS, then convert back to AC for the built in power supply and then back to DC for the hardware. Does anyone know of single conversion solutions in the UPS market? Something that goes from AC to DC and then straight to the hardware with protection and backup?

And the next and probably bigger question is about hard drive storage. With the low cost of RAM these days it's very reasonable to put a GB or more RAM in a single unit. And with that much space in RAM, who needs a swap file? So my idea is to design the workhorse units with a heap of RAM and no local storage. This should in theory save power draw, equipment costs and increase reliability. But is it workable?

Linux should be able to boot from network, and I know there are Motherboards out there that support it as well. But I've never tried this. Do they still require a local disk for some other purpose after the initial boot? Would it be possible to run everything from RAM? Would the network traffic become a big problem when the units needed to read or write to the disk array?

What resources are out there that I may have missed?"

Comments

Re:Sorta

[vrt3]

It's possible to run everything in RAM (just use memfs's), and to run without a swap, but should a runaway process or memory leak get you with no swap, your machine is as good as dead ;)

True, when too much memory is used in one way or the other, it can kill machine. But, I wonder, is it better when you have swap? I mean, I used to have 256 MB RAM, and 256 MB swap space. Now I have 896 MB of RAM, and no swap space. I would think chances of low memory conditions occuring are less with 896 MB RAM, even without swap space.

I guess it would even be better to have lots of RAM and a few gigs of swap space, but I'd rather use those extra gigs for an MP3 copy of my music CDs.